


Human-Shaped

by versaphile



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Depression, Episode: s03e07 42, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-29
Updated: 2007-08-29
Packaged: 2017-11-25 10:44:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versaphile/pseuds/versaphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-42, contains UST. It's not you, it's me. If he said it, it wouldn't help anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Human-Shaped

She was doing it again. Looking at him. He was really starting to suspect that she'd lied when she said she only went for humans, but it was probably his own fault for being so human-shaped in the first place. Two hearts and an entirely different biology aside, it was an easy mistake to make, one he usually relied on when visiting worlds with other human or human-shaped inhabitants. There were quite a lot of those, even taking into account the incredible usefulness of having a form with binocular vision and opposable thumbs and upright locomotion, and don't think he hadn't heard the rumours back home about Rassilon and oh he didn't want to think about home he really really didn't so he wouldn't and oh look there was a button he'd forgotten what it was for so he'd just go ahead and press it.

Martha yelped and clung to the console as the ship rocked violently.

"Is it supposed to do that?" she asked, alarmed.

It wasn't, actually, but she didn't know that and he wasn't going to tell her because, well, because he didn't need his ego to be deflated just at the moment so he fiddled with a dial that he'd adapted from what used to be a completely incompatible quantum fluctuator he'd picked up at a flea market and found again a few decades ago when he'd been looking for a pack of everlasting matches which he'd been sure had been in that room but in the end he'd found them in his pocket and wasn't it always the last place you looked? 

"Perfectly fine," he assured her. "Course correction. Vortex is a bit... swirly today." That probably wasn't very convincing but she just gave a skeptical eyebrow twitch and didn't know enough about Vortex current patterns to know he was completely lying. Lying lying lying, that's what he did best these days. He tried not to feel bad about it. She didn't really need to know. She wouldn't understand even if he told her, even though she was quite smart for a human, because she couldn't even see that time wasn't linear for goodness sake. That's why he never tried to explain fourth-dimensional physics to humans, and he wasn't about to break a habit that had served him well for this long. Old habits were the best habits, and he had to hold on to something when he changed or else where was he?

Oh yes, trying not to crash. The ship shuddered again as they careened through time and space, so he fiddled with the console for a bit and paid attention to that instead of Martha's incessant watching, and maybe he needed to pick up another human so she could stare at them for a while and give the back and top and side of his head a rest. Maybe a male human. He wasn't entirely oblivious, even if he would like to be. He just thought that if he kept ignoring the problem it would go away. That was his favourite way to solve problems, and it usually worked so well. Well, not really so well. If he was being honest with himself it usually ended in disaster because the universe never liked being ignored but he wasn't being honest he was lying lying lying because he liked it, and the universe could go hang itself. Except not because he didn't want to be killed by the massive implosion of all of reality collapsing in on itself, but one human with a crush wasn't quite the same scale.

He only knew of one way to solve the problem with Martha, apart from his preferred tactic of pretending complete obliviousness, but then she would hate him and leave him and that would be worse, quite a lot worse, so he was just going to keep lying, like the universe kept expanding and time kept weaving back on itself and Gallifrey kept on failing to exist.

She had a phone and a key. Surely that was enough. What else did she want from him, blood? Well, she couldn't have it, he'd already had it sucked out once since meeting her and it had been entirely unpleasant and only a tiny bit of a relief but he wasn't thinking about that either because if he did it wasn't going to go anywhere that was helpful or good or life-affirming. She wanted human things and he was only human-shaped and it wasn't at all the same thing no matter how much it looked that way to her human brain and senses and expectations.

In hindsight, the genetic transfer had probably been... confusing. But he hadn't expected to see her again once they either all died or didn't die and he had left on his own just him and his ship and if he hadn't missed her so much he wouldn't have gone back. He couldn't bring himself to regret going back, even if he still wasn't entirely sure it was a good idea and he'd invited her along for a second time and picking up humans was maybe an old habit that he ought to break but he probably couldn't even if he tried which he had done and it hadn't worked so there you go. Case in illuminating point. He changed course again because that reminded him of a very impressive light show in the skies over the frozen ruins of the Wantrafan conglomeration and he was really happy with planets that were largely dark and cold right now so that sounded perfect. She'd enjoyed the ice skating. He liked it when she smiled and was happy and he could pretend that everything was all right and wonderful and she was smiling at someone worth smiling at and not him.

They landed, and in one piece, much to Martha's relief. Not half-bumpy, she'd called his driving, and maybe he should fix those broken stabilizers if he can figure out what entirely unrelated parts he could adapt into TARDIS stabilizers because there weren't any other TARDISes anymore and there weren't any spare parts and every time he had to replace a part of her with something alien it was like killing so maybe he would just skip it for now.

"Here we are," he said, and gave the parking break a good yank. "The planet Felle, about a billion years in your past, quite near the Eye of Orion which is a lovely spot and remind me to take you there sometime but you'll love this." He skipped over to the door and held his hand over it, giving her a dramatic pause. She grinned at him with a faint air of exasperation and a lot of anticipation and he loved these moments, when he was giving her the universe and she was happy and there was nothing but the potential of the moment before she looked at an alien world with oh so human awe. 

"Ready?" he asked, leaning in, basking in it.

"Ready," she said, bracing herself in that way that she did that made him smile and he pushed open the door and she gave that little pause and then hurried out into the brightly-lit night.

He closed the door behind him and stuck his hands in his pockets and followed after her, already preparing a few suitably impressive facts to dither on about but later, he didn't need that now because it really was a stunning, beautiful sight, vivid and alive even though it was only--only!--the collision of charged particle ions in the atmosphere, carried by the solar winds and only an almost unending meteor shower though it will have ended by the time Martha Jones was born because everything has its time.

The honeycomb of a dead civilization stretched out beneath them, and they watched the destruction of countless billion particles and it was breathtaking even as a wave of equally stunning grief swept over him and was gone. That happened sometimes, actually a lot actually all the time because death was everywhere he looked and everywhen he went and he was quite sure he deserved nothing less so he didn't fight it but he didn't want her to see that because then...

He needed the words now so he quietly spoke about those suitably impressive facts, let that old habit take over and that was better, that was easier, and she was definitely impressed and this had been the right choice, no slums or sewers or burning hot living suns screaming for revenge inside his head and trying to make him kill, and if there was death then at least it wasn't the kind that screamed and bled and hurt and burned, it was simply the kind where time passed and matter became energy and light and the planets turned and turned. 

He ran out of words, but that was alright. Martha did companionable silence rather well for a companionable companion, and he'd brought out a blanket so she wouldn't be too cold and he wasn't sure that he had entirely stopped burning inside even after the ice skating so he sat on the cold ground and breathed the cold air and the steam of his breath looked like smoke to him and he realized he was hurting his hands by gripping the sharp rocks too hard but the pain helped and he thought of ice ages and the near-zero of space and that was better. He let out a slow, careful breath and it was only condensation and the sonic screwdriver hadn't detected any traces of the living sun inside him and he was fine, really fine, and he flattened out his hands and let go of the sharp rocks.

She was looking at him and not the sky, and she was frowning. "Are you all right?" she asked, concerned. "Do you want to share the blanket?" she asked, obviously thinking he was chilly which he was but he needed to be chilly and possibly frozen in liquid oxygen but he knew this was a human thing, sharing a blanket, being close, and he couldn't, he couldn't. 

"I'm fine," he said, pretending to smile reassuringly and not sure he was pulling it off. She gave a casual shrug and wrapped the edge of the blanket back around herself and he knew he'd hurt her. Just sometimes, just a little bit, he hated that she kept doing that, kept wanting something from him that he was incapable of giving, kept wanting him to be someone worth loving but he wasn't, he wasn't, he was a monster who lied to her again and again, lied just by breathing in and out, lied by looking young and happy and not old and broken and covered in the blood of his people. 

It's not you, it's me. If he said it, it wouldn't help anything.

Rose wouldn't have made him talk about Gallifrey. Rose would have let that sleeping Cerberus lie. He'd travelled with her for two years and she'd let him pretend and everything was fine wonderful perfect, she wanted the universe and he gave it to her and she wanted him to smile and he smiled for her and she didn't want to know about his past and the people he'd lost and the crimes he'd committed and he'd barely let anything slip and that had been easy, like gliding across the ice, and with just a bit of downward tilt he could have glided on forever and ever. But Martha looked at him like Donna had looked at him and she had pressed him like Donna had pressed him and Donna had taken a good hard look at him and had almost left skid marks in her rush to escape what he was. Martha wanted what she thought he was and she cared about him and caring for her meant making him talk about Gallifrey and he'd given her just enough so he could pretend and then she'd made him talk again and he'd given her just enough so she would be satisfied and he could still pretend because she didn't know that everyone lost because he'd killed all of them.

If she stopped seeing him as human-shaped then he would lose her, and he was so very tired of losing people. He needed her enthusiasm and her smile and her wonder, because he wasn't sure he had any of his own anymore, not really. He needed her to be happy so he could pretend he was, too. She would leave him eventually, because she was a frequent flier but she had a life and a family and a job and rent to pay, she wasn't going to stay with him forever or even promise to before she was ripped away from him and trapped in another universe. She knew it was only short-term and it had always been short-term even when he hadn't quite been able to face any kind of term and still wasn't if he was being honest with himself but he wasn't.

"Doctor," Martha said, in that way of hers that made him tense up. But if she had been about to press, she changed her mind and didn't. "What happened to the people who lived here? The Wan... Wantrafans?"

"Plague," the Doctor said, simply. Her eyes widened in alarm. "No no, don't worry. It's long gone, and aside from that we couldn't pick it up. Incompatible."

"That's a relief," she said, definitely meaning it. "I had wondered. About disease. I mean, we've gone to places where there are humans and there's got to be all sorts of viruses and bacteria. You haven't exactly given us shots."

"Don't need to," the Doctor said. "Well, I don't need anything. The TARDIS takes care of you."

Her brow furrowed as she considered this. "Like with languages?"

"Yes, close to. It knows what to do to keep you safe, as much as it can. And it keeps you from contaminating the natives. It's all automatic, really, haven't thought about it in ages myself. Couldn't really have time travel without it or you'd end up wiping out everybody you met."

"That's amazing," she said, suitably impressed. The Doctor preened a bit. "Wish we could adapt that back home. God, it would be massively useful."

"Sorry," he said. 

"It's all right. Timelines and all that. I get it." But he knew she was thinking of all the people she could save with it. He was proud of her for that.

"It really is beautiful," she said, after a long silence. "Not just the sky. This whole place. The whole universe." She laughed. "All this time and I still can't take it in. We're on another world a billion years in the past, sitting on a great big alien... hive, or something, and it's just mad. It's completely mad." She was grinning now, eyes full of wonder, and now it was his turn to stare, to watch, to soak her up, because it was like a drug for him to have someone like this with him, making everything new and wonderful again. It made him want to take her everywhere and forget that London, Earth, 2007 ever existed. To just forget to take her home, to keep finding another sight to see and another adventure to experience.

"Doctor," she breathed, and too late he realized that she'd caught him, caught him looking at her like she was everything and now she was looking at him and leaning in and kissing him and he couldn't move even as he screamed silently because he'd been trying to avoid this and he jolted back and she flinched like she'd been hit and the guilt was unbearable and he couldn't look at her and she was _apologizing_ and just like that he'd lost her.

"Don't go," he begged, so quietly, and she stilled, half-standing, the blanket gathered in her hands.

"Doctor?" she said, worried again even though he'd just hurt her, even though it was all his fault because he was selfish, selfish and a coward and so lonely he sometimes a lot always wanted to die. 

She pressed her palm against his cheek and it was cooler than normal but still human-warm and she should be slapping him like her mother and Jackie and Donna but it was gentle and caring and it broke him. The pain was so bad he couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe, she was talking but he couldn't hear over the blood rushing in his ears and now she was looking really worried and she didn't know he had a respiratory bypass system. But there was a breath, and then another, and she'd wrapped the blanket around him and was soothing him and asking him questions and he realized he was shivering.

"I knew something was wrong," she muttered. "It's not the sun thing, please tell me it's not that? I thought you were all right." She sounded so distressed, like he mattered, like he was worth fretting over. If he could just find his voice again he could reassure her but there was such a weight on his chest that he couldn't. He just shook his head, hoping that would be enough.

"Not the sun," she said, smart girl. She looked past him towards the TARDIS, big and blue and safe, and she pulled his arm over her shoulders and his legs weren't working right but somehow they stumbled across the frozen ground and inside. She dumped him in the captain's chair with a grunt and the paralyzing guilt and pain and loss were fading again, back to something manageable, the way it usually was, never gone but he could handle it. He could. Except when he couldn't.

"You're heavier than you look," she said, trying to make him laugh. He wanted it to work, but she was going to leave him and it felt like the end of everything and it was all his fault and the end of everything was his fault too. 

"Talk to me, please?" she said, leaning over him, her hands on him, fluttering like bird's wings, trying to find some physical cause for his collapse. "Say something."

"Nothing," he said, between gritted teeth. "It's nothing, I just... need..." What did he need? "I just need a minute."

"It's not nothing," she said, and it was like New New York again, the worst kind of look that said she wasn't going to stop until he was honest, until he told her where it hurt so she could help him. 

"It's nothing you want to know," he said, his own anger shocking him, shocking her. He regretted it immediately. "I'm sorry. Sorry."

"It's all right," she said, as if it had anything to do with her, and she probably thought it did. "I shouldn't have kissed you." She looked embarrassed now. "I thought... I don't know what I thought." She walked away, turned back. "You said it meant nothing, on the moon. But you came back. I thought... God, I'm so..."

"Please, stop," he said, wearily. He remembered Rose and her mortgage, and knew that he'd hurt her by not being what she wanted, just as he was hurting Martha.

Martha stopped. She had closed up, preparing herself for the worst, but mostly just hurt, her human heart broken. He already missed her smile.

He stood and didn't face her and tried to think of how to not make this worse. Hoped it wasn't already too late, though he was so certain that it was. She couldn't want to stay with him now, no matter how many alien landscapes he still had to show her.

"It's not me," she said, suddenly, and he was so surprised that he looked up. "I thought you did but you don't even see me. Is it her? Rose?" She said the name so calmly, and again he found himself proud of her, that she could be so strong.

"No," he said, clearly. He missed her so much, but no. 

"Then what?" she asked.

"I lied," he said, and oh, it was New New York all over again. Line by line, and this time he couldn't pretend. It was too late for that. "Because I couldn't lose you."

Her eyes widened, then narrowed as she tried to figure that out, figure him out. He was a puzzle to her, a mystery that tantalized her with the glimmers of truth he couldn't hide.

"Who said I was leaving?" she said, slowly, as if making a decision right then and there. She took a few steps closer, but left a safe space between them. Maybe she knew he needed it.

He wrapped his arms around himself. He wanted to jump at the console and take them anywhere, find something terrible to throw himself into so he could fix something because he couldn't save himself or his people or anyone he cared about but sometimes he could save strangers. Sometimes nobody died. 

"I'm not going anywhere," Martha said, determined now, taking another step closer and another and then resting her hand on his arm. "You can tell me, no matter how bad it is," she said, even though it was that bad. She was searching him like the almost-doctor she was, trying to find where it hurt and why so she could stop the pain. "I think you need to."

He swallowed hard, and that must have been answer enough. 

"Nowhere to sit in this room," she muttered, and took him by the arm and lead him through a door to a room with comfortable chairs and a sofa and there was already tea, with a patterned tea cosy and bone china cups in saucers. "You have the most amazing ship," she said, shaking her head and she made him sit and poured him tea and put the cup in his hands, and she'd definitely done this before and probably talked to dying patients and their families and he hadn't really thought about that before, and somehow that made it easier. 

She'd put too much sugar in his tea, but he didn't mind.

"If you really don't want to talk about it, I'm not going to force you," she said. 

He nodded. "I know," he said.

"Is it... about the war? Your planet?" 

He nodded.

"All right," she said, and looked thoughtful. "I've met soldiers, at the hospital. You look like them, sometimes. What they saw, the killing... they never got over it. Not completely." She spoke with a sad sympathy, eyes distant as she remembered some poor ruined human. 

"You've said things," she continued, "like on the roof, with Lazarus. And with the Daleks... I was so scared because you... it was like you _wanted_ to die."

He did, he did. And he didn't need to say it, because she'd figured it out on her own. He hadn't been hiding it very well, he supposed. Shouting at Daleks to kill him and putting himself in the way of massive lightning bolts wasn't the kind of thing you did if you wanted to survive. He just wanted to stop hurting, for someone to end it, take it out of his hands. The sun almost had, it had hurt so much it drowned out everything else and he'd surrendered to it because it was stronger than him and because it meant it would all be over. But she'd saved the ship, saved him, and the old pain was back just as strong as before. Maybe worse, because just for a little while it had _stopped_.

"You thought it would scare me away, whatever it was," she said, thinking aloud, filling the silence because he couldn't manage the job himself. "And, well, you were in a massive war. All your people died."

So close, so close. He still couldn't say it. He wondered if she would make that leap, if he could watch as she realized with increasing horror that the man she made tea for was the killer of his own kind. He watched her face, waiting for the moment, but it didn't come.

"The scale of it... I can't even begin to imagine what you saw, or did," she said, pitying him. 

"Don't," he said, angry with her for it. Wanting her to know but never wanting her to know. Waiting for her to instantly understand and furious that she would dare to try to comprehend what he went through, with her human brain. The arrogance of it from both sides was breathtaking.

"Don't what?" she said, confused. 

"Just don't," he said, animated by self-disgust and irritation. He put down the teacup with a loud clank and ran his hands through his hair. "It's not what you think."

"And what do I think?" Martha said, her own voice rising.

"You think I'm someone you can help," the Doctor said. "You think I'm human because I look human." He looked her in the eye. "You think I'm safe." 

"I never thought that," she said, not backing down. "First time I met you I thought you were mad, and I know you're not safe."

"You have no idea," he said, voice low, and just like that he was back in his old body, leather jacket and bad attitude and he remembered being that, pushing everyone away and pushing Rose away. He'd been angry then, and he was angry now.

"Just tell me what's wrong," Martha said, as if what hurt him was hurting her. "Please."

He couldn't. He hadn't told Rose, or Jack, or anyone. Not this. He stood up, abruptly, and stalked out of the room. He went to the console but for once there was nowhere he wanted to go, so he went back out to the planet instead. He'd left his coat inside, and without it the cold was a punishing balm. He wanted to freeze, and it wasn't just the memory of the living sun, he wanted to freeze the burning burning lump that used to be the shining world of the seven systems but now only blazed in his head, eating him away and turning him slowly to ash. Or maybe the only cure for fire was fire and he shouldn't have hauled himself back into the airlock but let himself fall into the sun, a death too certain for regeneration. That was how his people ended their physical lives, ceremonial cremation, the cleansing fire that destroyed the base matter of failed bodies and left the mind and memory to sleep inside the Matrix, but now the Matrix had burned and there was absolutely, utterly nothing.

He looked down at the empty conglomeration and wondered how they had disposed of their plague-dead. Wondered who had been the last survivor, who had to die alone when it had known a hive mind, whose body would never have its last rites. If it had been an old man or a young child, if it had gone for help and come back to a city of the dead, if it had stayed and watched in vain as its family had died around it. If it had been the plague-carrier, immune itself but not from the grief as one by one they all died. If it had been on purpose.

He sat on the edge of a sheer drop and let the cold sink into his bones. 

"I think I know enough of hate," he recited, into the endless silence. "To know that for destruction ice is also great, and would suffice."

It was a long time before Martha found him. She'd brought his coat. "Oh, you're freezing," she said, and draped it around him. She rubbed his arms and his back, trying to warm him, and he let her.

He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon. He didn't need to look at her to know how worried she was for him, and he didn't want to see her pity, when pity was the last thing he deserved. A barb sat on the tip of his tongue, something cold and cruel that would chase her away, but he couldn't bring himself to say it. He couldn't hurt her, even though it seemed that was all he did.

She thought she wanted him, but what she really wanted was the illusion of him. The man he pretended to be, the human-shaped mockery of a Time Lord. The thing of it was, they'd never liked him, never wanted him unless it was for some dirty errand. When they'd called him back to Gallifrey, when things had started going badly, the first thing they'd done was lock him up and yell at him for not destroying the Daleks in their cradle. And like the naive fool he used to be he'd said it wasn't his right do what they'd ordered him to do so long ago. He'd _moralized_. They'd only let him out later because they needed him to fight, they needed everyone to fight. They'd even begun resurrecting people from the Matrix, though by the time they were that desperate he was already on the front lines.

Every person he met between returning to Gallifrey and the end of the Time War, every single person and every single species, they all died. By Daleks, by aftershocks, by accidents and time inversions and rips in reality and domino cascades and sabotage and sometimes by knives and fists and suffocation in the vacuum of space without a suit, eyes frozen and staring and betrayed. It had been a slaughter like nothing else, a scale beyond even his own comprehension. At some point it becomes too much and the mind shuts down, goes numb. At some point the decisions become so hard you either stop feeling or you fling yourself into a Dalek's blast. No more moralizing, no more innocence. Just death after death after death, each one just a little bit worse, another drop of blood in an endless ocean.

So many times he'd wished he'd never survived the end. He shouldn't have survived. It had been a fluke, a random cruelty. His existence even now was impossible, when his planet's existence had been wiped from time. When trillions had died and he hadn't.

"There's a lever," he said, his soft voice loud in the silence. "A fast return switch. Go back to the TARDIS and hold it down."

"What does it do?" Martha asked.

"It takes you home," he said. 

"You are joking, right? I'm not gonna leave you here," she said, shocked at the suggestion.

"Do it," he said, rounding on her at last. 

"No," she said.

" _Do it._ Leave me here," he ordered.

"Forget it, mister," she said, defiant. "You want to sit out here and freeze, then I'm gonna sit right here with you." She crossed her arms at him.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He looked down at the sheer drop, a thousand feet down, and her hand was on his arm, silently warning.

"Don't even think about it," she said, her voice suddenly thick with sadness. He looked up and her fear for him was more of a blow than any slap. "Don't you dare even think about that."

He nodded, resigned. He'd only come back anyway. He still had three lives left.

"The state of you," she said. "It's been like this, all this time?"

He didn't need to answer that. She wrapped her arms around him, holding him tight. 

"I can't," he said, finally. It was too big. It was simply too much for words.

"That's all right," she said, comforting him. "Like I said, you don't have to. I understand enough, okay? And I'm still here. I'm not leaving. Now come on, let's go inside. I'm bloody freezing!"

He did as he was told.

Some time later, he ended up in the garden. It was morning there, warm and pleasant and green. In this room it was always late spring, because that was when the plants were happiest. He stared at a jardelian blossom for a long time. Nothing ever went out of flower, just like the food in the kitchen never went bad. Temporal grace, selectively applied. Sometimes he found butterfly cocoons, but all the nearby leaves were whole and undamaged. Impossible things everywhere he turned, and there must have been a time when he stopped believing everything was possible because he didn't used to have such limited thinking. Without the Eye of Harmony whole galaxies should have collapsed, but everything was fine. The universe had healed and kept on going.

A butterfly lighted on the jardelian blossom, taking nectar and giving pollen, taking sustenance in exchange for life. There used to be a butterfly room, full of endless hills covered with wildflowers and endless clouds of butterflies so thick you couldn't see the sky when they engulfed you. It had been beautiful and he'd loved it so much when his love for everything had been so fresh and strong. It had been destroyed, too.

He heard her footsteps in the grass, but didn't turn to face her. 

"Feeling better?" she asked, cautiously.

He ought to tell her he was fine, better than fine, but she didn't deserve to be lied to. "Not really," he said. "But it's safe to leave me around the aspirin again."

"You what?"

"Just a little joke," he said, turning to face her. "Your hair's wet."

"Yeah," she said, touching it self-consciously. "I didn't use up all the hot water but it wasn't for lack of trying."

"Sorry about that," he said, ducking his head. 

"Don't apologize," she told him. "I'm your friend, right? Friends are there for each other."

"You're right. I know. Thank you," he said, and he meant it. That was something, at least.

"Friends also don't lie to each other," she told him, giving him one of her looks again. "I meant what I said. You don't need to tell me everything. But don't tell me you're happy when you're not."

When he looked at her, he could tell she was still in love with him. She reached up and brushed some of the wildness from his hair. He looked away.

"I can't be what you want me to be," he said. 

It still hurt her, he could tell. She pulled away, just a bit.

"You were wrong about one thing," he continued. "I did see you. Right from the start."

"Oh," she said, in the strangest way. But all she said was, "Good," and to his relief they left it at that.

"Hold out your hand," he told her, gently. He stuck his own out, palm down, and waited for her to do the same. It took a minute, but a bright blue butterfly flitted by and landed on his hand, and then another one came to rest on hers. She smiled and laughed quietly, not wanting to startle it. 

"They're so lovely," she said, and her delight eased something in him. 

"They are," he agreed. The butterfly on his hand flew away, off to find something sweet. "Come on," he said, holding out his hand to her. "We have a universe to explore."

She took his hand, and held it.


End file.
